GYF

Every function that the central bank provides—facilitating international value flows, reconciling account balances, and maintaining monetary policy—involves an army of humans to accomplish. The federal reserve alone has 20 000 people working, there are probably another 200 000 people that follow their movements very closely trying to figure out what the federal reserve will do next, so they can communicate that information to the broader market. Bitcoin satisfies and provides all the aforementioned functionalities of the central bank with distributed software.

They say that Bitcoin is used for criminal activity, but nothing has been used for such activity more than the US dollar. And the banks know about it. To me, something like the FinCEN news story was like someone telling me “guess what, the sky is blue and water is wet!” We know that banks assist criminal enterprise and that governments are involved as well. There is a reason that Bitcoiners say “Short the bankers, Long Bitcoin” as Anthony Pompliano stated. Banks are corrupt. The whole banking system structure is meant to enrich the wealthy and hold down and discriminate against the poor.

401K is a type of account that you can use to hold investments. Decades ago, companies used to offer pensions, but that changed. Over time, they started shifting to 401K. This account is a system account offered by an employer for an employee. An employee can put a percentage of their income into 401K from their paycheck, and it will not be taxed. Usually, the employer matches that; if the employee puts 5 % of his or her paycheck in, the employer will also put 5% up to a certain time. Now, that money will be put in a vehicle where it will be tax-advantaged, and you can invest in equities, bonds, ETFs, etc., depending on what kind of asset class is being offered.

Gold and silver have been used as money by human beings for thousands of years, but in the 13th century, some city republics in northern Italy, such as Florence and Venice, issued a gold coin by their mint that had been changed to purity. This was unprecedented and such an event had never happened before where a coin had such stability and a government didn't devalue the currency like it had done in the past, such as during the Roman Empire and the Greek city-states. Because of the stability of the Gold Florin, the coin of Florence, and also the gold Ducat in Venice, this new class of merchant bankers started to issue promises to pay Florin and Ducat.

People have been connecting through games for decades. Many players would try to farm content and sell rare items for real money, but they were limited by what the developers allowed them to do. It was more of a white and black market and not creating a real legitimate opportunity. However, we are taking the opposite approach; we are embracing the idea of opening the doors to the virtual world and encouraging the players to create and trade the content. We hope that we will unlock more value for players and creators, and the gaming industry in general by increasing conversion as the 4th industrial revolution is progressing.

Back in 2017, people were keeping their assets on a hardware wallet. There was one individual who faced a massive hack and lost around 60 million dollars’ worth of assets on his hardware wallet. The attacker knew that this guy was using that kind of wallet, and targeted his attack by delivering a fake software update for the wallet. The holder didn't see that the message wasn’t from the official wallet administrators and when he opened the software it didn't go to the official homepage for the update either. Still, he didn't think much of it and clicked “yes” to the update. Seconds after, the fake uploader started to install the fake wallet and stole everything on the wallet. The poor guy lost 60 million in a few minutes by just installing the wrong software update. So, what I am trying to say is that you should never install anything that is not from licensed stores.

The most controversial issue was the scaling war, which happened in 2017, and it went on for a long period. It was about the block size; do we want a bigger block size or not? That was fascinating, and I can look back on it now and understand it a lot better than what I did then. At the time, I had no idea which side to choose, so I just picked a side. Fortunately, I ended up on the right side, but I could easily have ended up on the wrong side.

The cypherpunk was a movement from the 1990s back when the internet was brand new and just had started to get more broadly adopted. Cypherpunks realized that the internet had huge potential and that there would be two potential outcomes of the internet. One would be the internet becoming a panopticon surveillance machine that would break everybody's privacy, and enable a totalitarian state. The other outcome would be privacy with strong encryption where people could communicate, trade, and transact freely and privately.

Art has not been hacked or laundered on SuperRare, but we have had people take artworks from SuperRare, and create an NFT token on another digital art platform with it. That is very upsetting, especially for the artists because they have been putting a lot of hard work into their artworks. Somebody who just rips them off by taking their work and taking the credit for it, does obviously not feel very good. We have been able to work with other platforms and marketplaces as partners to prevent this from happening. They can take down the fraudulent work from the website, but the interesting thing is that no one can take down the created token on the blockchain. Additionally, since the original artwork is tied to a token it’s very easy to spot a fake.

I got into Bitcoin in my senior year at University in 2013. A group of friends discovered Bitcoin, and us being a little libertarian-minded, we thought it was very interesting. After college, I took a job at FedEx, an American multinational delivery services company, and worked in a revenue strategy group developing alternative payment options for countries around the world. Thanks to that position, I spent some time in Asia. Together with the team back then, we onboarded Alipay and WeChat pay. Spending some time especially in China blew me away by how far ahead Asia was getting in terms of digital payments.

Back when people didn’t have computers or the internet, information got around a lot slower. People could not go online, and see what the inflation rate was, or what their rates were. There was far less information available, and even the people who were watching out for the markets were just getting all the information from newspapers. However, the majority of many people were not following it at all. In the 1930s and 1940s, one of the answers to maintaining your wealth would be gold. In this way, if you held gold, you defended against all that currency devaluation. To cancel out this option, many countries including the US, made it illegal to own gold. Also, because people could not track real-time information, they did not really see the need for it to buy gold.

We have launched a new podcast that premiered on the 16th of August called The Orange Pill Podcast. The concept of the Orange Pill Podcast is to uncover what happens after you have had the red-pilled. Many people say “they took the Red Pill” or “I am woke”. But now what? After you take the red pill, you have to take the orange pill. The orange pill is really the Bitcoin pill, and everything that encompasses Bitcoin financially, monetarily, religiously, economically, spiritually, sociologically, psychologically, cosmically, universally, etc. So, you have to make sure you don’t miss it.